On the road between gigs in Serbia, Hugo Race can recall the optimism in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell as more recent history comes darkly to bear.
By Hugo Race.

On tour in Serbia

Travelling through the Braničevski district of Serbia, east of Belgrade.

Credit: Hugo Race

The howling police sirens of Hungarian border city Szeged fade into the distance along with the helicopters and interminable border controls and glittering razor wire thrown up to block the foot-march of Syrian civil war refugees. The night air bristles with cold electricity. The highway is deserted.

At the wheel, Nex gently explains that the Peugeot is pre-CD vintage and the cassette player is broken. We listen to randomly tuned local radio stations, mass-produced autotuned muzak broadcast in fragments between blasts of white noise static. Only two hours to Belgrade, Nex says, you want to take a break?

Cigarette smoke drifts in the still air of a petrol station cafe. Mica and I woke up in Vienna early this morning, shook off the fatigue of last night’s show and hit the road for the Balkans, leaving our rental car locked up in a Szeged hotel car park with all our money hidden beneath the vehicle floor. The European Union finishes at the Hungarian–Serbian border, we had been warned; once you cross that line, rental cars have been known to disappear at high speed into the twilight chop shops of Kosovo and Albania.

We’ve been on the road driving and playing every night for three weeks. I rub the exhaustion from my eyes. The vast northern plain of Serbia broods beneath a thick carpet of cloud, 360 degrees of smudged horizon. Occasional power stations puncture the skyline of flat space.

The traffic intensifies as we approach the Serbian capital, merging with the heavy stream of machines clogging the city expressway. A broken-down truck brings the flow to a dead stop. The aged and battered vehicles around us blow out black exhaust, the air thick with petro-smog.

Aleks, our promoter and a legend of the Serbian music scene, invites us into the apartment where his mother is cooking a spicy casserole of smoked pork and cabbage; heavy, powerfully salted food washed down with local red wine and chemical-tasting water. The six o’clock news plays on the television – smooth-shaven politicians charming the studio audience. They describe neighbouring Kosovo as a terrorist state. At the same time, seeking to ingratiate themselves into the EU, they say they recognise Kosovo as a partner in the Balkan peace process.

Serbia has been left out in the cold since the failed genocidal wars of the ’90s. Just before our arrival, war criminal Ratko Mladić was sentenced in The Hague for atrocities committed in Bosnia 25 years ago.

I played across the post-Soviet satellite states nearly 30 years ago, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, counting myself lucky if the club’s electricity was stable enough to get through an entire concert. But there was a sense of idealism in the air, a feeling that the world was transitioning.

Tonight, as we start up the music in Belgrade’s KC Grad club, I remember those long ago and far-off times. Inside the KC Grad, at least, the audience shares excitement, energy, exhilaration and expectation. The lights, the sound, the pulse, the ambience of our electronically abstracted John Lee Hooker blues take over. The blues speaks to everybody. It’s a visceral thing – the trance beat, the minor major third, the torment. No translation necessary.

When it’s over I find a moment alone to stare out the backstage windows across the shadowy docks and the glittering void of the Sava River, allowing my thoughts to dive and tumble through the haze of exhaustion that coats my mind like film.

When the adrenaline is all gone and the road fatigue begins twisting reality out of shape, the world feels very distant and out of focus. I miss my so-very-faraway loved ones with a keen, clear pang of pain. At the same time, I don’t miss them, don’t want them here. Heavy rain falls as the windows mist over and the chatter of the crowd echoes up the stairs. Invisible minutes pass as I change out of one filthy shirt into another, wipe the sweat and dirt from my face.

I wake up slightly hungover to the screech of what sounds like cars driving directly through the apartment walls. Throwing on warm clothes, I stumble into the tumult of Belgrade – people staring out through the windows of overcrowded, smoke-belching buses, old folk barely strong enough to stand upright selling straw, buttons and dried fruit on decaying concrete footpaths, Romani kids watching hawk-eyed.

The high street is full of five-star fashion boutiques aimed at the global elite. Empty of customers, they are showcases for an eerie sense of unreality. Giant coal-scented housing blocks snake through the city cluster on its fringes like light-security jails.

The rain is still falling as we load the Peugeot and shudder across the potholed muddy roads leading out of the city, headed for Kladovo, an isolated town four or five hours away where the Balkan mountains meet the Danube.

The mountains are high and rugged and the road twists and turns along the course of the river through unlit tunnels, Nex dodging the oncoming high-speed semitrailers with practised skill. Small boulders stud the roadside, rocks big enough to punch a hole in the fuel tank or cripple the drive shaft. Giant nets have been deployed but the stones keep rolling down regardless, the way the past keeps intruding into the present, like Hooker’s delta blues, still sung long after the author has gone.

The aspiring mayor of Kladovo visits our show in a small community centre with his entourage. He speaks of “our traditions” in accented English practised on the international visitors attracted here during the balmy months of summer when the good times roll. I’m called upon to pose together for selfies in support of his imminent election. He’s a government man, but holds the purse strings for events in the zone, and so good vibes in the name of art must flow.

Later, I fall asleep in my room in a grim Soviet hotel so overheated I’ve opened the windows to the zero-degree air. A ’70s Slavic movie flickers on the television screen – a factory worker’s secret affair slowly driving his wife to suicide in a dimly lit proletarian screen world.

Waking in the frozen morning light with the curtains billowing in a glacial wind, I see the huge volume of the Danube River flowing through the mountain valley, Romania on the far side, giant shipyards clustered around a dam downstream. The town is small but the surrounds are on an epic scale, a portrait of an ancient Romanian king carved out of the side of a mountain implacably facing off Serbia across the river.

The mystic aura clinging to this wild countryside dissipates the closer we drive towards Novi Sad. Clouds hang low and grey, rain falls and the usual breakdowns bring traffic to a standstill, our windscreen wipers beating in time with the robotic pop music nagging from the car radio.

Hours pass until we re-emerge onto the northern plain with its high-tension electricity cables and towers sparkling like Christmas lights in the November freeze. Novi Sad is an ancient town of one-way streets, frustrating to navigate. We circle through the downtown until Nex defies the traffic signs and video cameras to pull up outside the local culture centre where we will perform tonight.

We’re late and within an hour or so the venue is crowded. I feel the shock of raw electricity from this audience, a hunger. The EU feels a million miles from here and yet the border is less than a hundred kilometres away, and there is movement in the shadows. The Russian military, I’m told, is covertly moving into Bosnia, selling their guns and helicopters and advisory personnel to Serb separatists dreaming of a united resurgent Serb “empire” rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the 14th century.

If politics is best measured by the depth of its failures, the collapse of the Yugoslavian federation 25 years ago was a seismic event that has now gone inter-generational. And its fruit is the new face of fascism “lite”, the most popular poison on offer at the bar at the end of time where we stand tonight, poised to go onstage to summon up the old blues of oppression and the long-ago.

The blues are still here. They are us.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
Mar 31, 2018 as "Blues Danube".
Subscribe here.

Mike Seccombe
As public faith in democracy collapses, the institution is further undermined by suspect polling, gormless politics and a media dependent on both.When the numbers don’t mean much, meaning must be attached to them. As the example of the recent Liberal coup shows, that can lead to disaster.

Mark Davis
The Indonesian military has employed airstrikes in West Papua – suspected to include the banned chemical weapon white phosphorus – as a retaliation for murders following a flag-raising protest.

Abdul Karim Hekmat
Four out of five asylum seekers in Australia will be left destitute and homeless next year after further planned cuts to support services. Sadoullah Malakooti, appealing the rejection of his refugee application, is among them.

Leah Jing McIntosh
Robin DiAngelo knows a lot about white privilege – it’s in her DNA. The American academic, author and anti-racism advocate talks about how structures of whiteness and so-called white progressives are continuing to damage the lives of people of colour. ‘I grew up in poverty … I was a feminist for most of my life before I realised I could also be an oppressor. But I draw from my experience of oppression … I think that helps. The key is not to exempt myself from being an oppressor, just because I experience oppression. Ask anyone if they’d rather be poor and white or poor and brown – I knew I was poor, but I also knew I was white.’

Wesley Enoch
Change the date, don’t change the date – I am agnostic. I think a national day could be a valuable tool in the binding of a nation, but only if it finds ways of including the three narratives, as Pearson has described them. I can imagine a three-stage national day of the future, one that stretches from our long First Nations history, through the narrative of the British arrival, to the waves of immigrant arrivals and life here now. Past, present and future.

Paul Bongiorno
The Prime Minister’s Office insists Morrison only learnt about Broad’s use of a website for ‘sugar daddy’ arrangements on the day New Idea broke the story. It is simply an incredible and grave dereliction of duty on McCormack’s part. He lamely claims he doesn’t ‘tell the prime minister everything about every member of parliament’ because he ‘has enough on his mind’.

Richard Ackland
It’s the annual speech day at St Brutes, the very private non-selective school and training ground for future Nasty Party boiler room operatives and their underlings in Cockies Corner at the other end of the dorm. The headmaster, Mr Morrison, was hoping for a speech day built around the theme of “fair dinkum” – to reflect the authenticity of Australia and its values. A cat was set among the pigeons, though, when it came to light that “fair dinkum” was actually an authentic Chinese expression from the goldfields of the 1890s.

Always, there was some spectre, some looming threat – a capricious American president, the North Korean nuclear arsenal, Russia’s cyber sabotage, the possibility of Brexit’s economic devastation, the inevitability of climate disaster. We lived, in 2018, at the edge of chaos. Faced with chaos, it is human to attempt to find order. The impulse is one that tends from sense towards containment, control. It is no coincidence this year of ataxia spurred authoritarianism.

Martin McKenzie-Murray
In a year bookended by National Party MPs in disgrace, we saw big banks and cricketers shamed, international politics teeter and literary and musical icons shuffle off this mortal coil. A look back at the year that was.

Helen Razer
The Golden Age of television is giving way to a period more gilded, but streaming giant Netflix has still bankrolled some worthy viewing this year, in the form of Dumplin’ and American Vandal.

Miriam Cosic
Bursting with colour, overwrought with emotion and rich in symbolism – the grandiloquent works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood leave the Tate to enliven the walls of the NGA in an exhibition powerful enough to convert even a non-fan.

Martin McKenzie-Murray
For cricket fans disillusioned and despondent over Australia’s ignominious fall from Test cricket grace, the current series against India promises the best Christmas gift of all.

Mike Seccombe
As public faith in democracy collapses, the institution is further undermined by suspect polling, gormless politics and a media dependent on both.When the numbers don’t mean much, meaning must be attached to them. As the example of the recent Liberal coup shows, that can lead to disaster.

Mark Davis
The Indonesian military has employed airstrikes in West Papua – suspected to include the banned chemical weapon white phosphorus – as a retaliation for murders following a flag-raising protest.

Abdul Karim Hekmat
Four out of five asylum seekers in Australia will be left destitute and homeless next year after further planned cuts to support services. Sadoullah Malakooti, appealing the rejection of his refugee application, is among them.

Leah Jing McIntosh
Robin DiAngelo knows a lot about white privilege – it’s in her DNA. The American academic, author and anti-racism advocate talks about how structures of whiteness and so-called white progressives are continuing to damage the lives of people of colour. ‘I grew up in poverty … I was a feminist for most of my life before I realised I could also be an oppressor. But I draw from my experience of oppression … I think that helps. The key is not to exempt myself from being an oppressor, just because I experience oppression. Ask anyone if they’d rather be poor and white or poor and brown – I knew I was poor, but I also knew I was white.’

Wesley Enoch
Change the date, don’t change the date – I am agnostic. I think a national day could be a valuable tool in the binding of a nation, but only if it finds ways of including the three narratives, as Pearson has described them. I can imagine a three-stage national day of the future, one that stretches from our long First Nations history, through the narrative of the British arrival, to the waves of immigrant arrivals and life here now. Past, present and future.

Paul Bongiorno
The Prime Minister’s Office insists Morrison only learnt about Broad’s use of a website for ‘sugar daddy’ arrangements on the day New Idea broke the story. It is simply an incredible and grave dereliction of duty on McCormack’s part. He lamely claims he doesn’t ‘tell the prime minister everything about every member of parliament’ because he ‘has enough on his mind’.

Richard Ackland
It’s the annual speech day at St Brutes, the very private non-selective school and training ground for future Nasty Party boiler room operatives and their underlings in Cockies Corner at the other end of the dorm. The headmaster, Mr Morrison, was hoping for a speech day built around the theme of “fair dinkum” – to reflect the authenticity of Australia and its values. A cat was set among the pigeons, though, when it came to light that “fair dinkum” was actually an authentic Chinese expression from the goldfields of the 1890s.

Always, there was some spectre, some looming threat – a capricious American president, the North Korean nuclear arsenal, Russia’s cyber sabotage, the possibility of Brexit’s economic devastation, the inevitability of climate disaster. We lived, in 2018, at the edge of chaos. Faced with chaos, it is human to attempt to find order. The impulse is one that tends from sense towards containment, control. It is no coincidence this year of ataxia spurred authoritarianism.

Martin McKenzie-Murray
In a year bookended by National Party MPs in disgrace, we saw big banks and cricketers shamed, international politics teeter and literary and musical icons shuffle off this mortal coil. A look back at the year that was.

Helen Razer
The Golden Age of television is giving way to a period more gilded, but streaming giant Netflix has still bankrolled some worthy viewing this year, in the form of Dumplin’ and American Vandal.

Miriam Cosic
Bursting with colour, overwrought with emotion and rich in symbolism – the grandiloquent works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood leave the Tate to enliven the walls of the NGA in an exhibition powerful enough to convert even a non-fan.

Martin McKenzie-Murray
For cricket fans disillusioned and despondent over Australia’s ignominious fall from Test cricket grace, the current series against India promises the best Christmas gift of all.